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The Need for Phronesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2022

Kristján Kristjánsson
Kristján Kristjánsson*
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

This chapter explores the state of public and academic discourse about socio-moral issues elicited by the Covid-19 pandemic, through two informal case studies of Facebook statuses and columns in two leading UK newspapers. The Facebook statuses tended to focus on performance virtues as remedies rather than moral virtues, whereas a survey among the general public highlighted the role of moral virtues. Divisions of opinion among columnists in the Guardian and Daily Telegraph turned out to be about different prioritisations of moral virtues rather than a trade-off between virtues and economic values. However, missing from all those discourses was attention to the meta-virtue of phronesis, or practical wisdom, as an adjudicator of virtue conflicts. Recent psychological work on wisdom does not fully ameliorate this lacuna; the paper argues that a retrieval of the Aristotelian concept of phronesis is needed to help us make balanced moral decisions.

Type
Paper
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 92: Values and Virtues for a Challenging World , October 2022 , pp. 167 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2022

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